Comps and Proposal Scheduled

This week I finally got a lot of stuff I have been working on for the past couple months to the next stage.  I finally got comps and dissertation proposal scheduled and my proposal approved by the chair of my committee to be handed out to the rest of my committee.  I am so very excited!

Wild fires and resource allocation

I ran across another interesting paper “Resource Sharing for Control of Wildland Fires“.  They have the problem of resource sharing between different fire stations that need particular resources.

This seems like a job for bounty hunting and raffles!  So, we have the tasks of providing particular resources.  Basically people request for a resource by putting a bounty for providing it.  Urgency of the need is mirrored by the bounty.  Resources that fire stations are not using can be put up to bid on in the Chinese auction and fire stations can use the tickets that they have acquired through going after tasks or received via auction to participate.  By structuring the sharing mechanism in this manner we motivate the fire stations to participate and due to bounty hunting being the mechanism we use to request particular resources the fire stations get what they want when they want it.

A similar problem appears in re-allocating food resources between food banks.  The same formula of bounty and auction style system could be applied.

Alexandria and Resource Allocation for Food Banks

The day before Halloween Les and I went to Alexandria and we did some of the scavenger hunt.  It was a amazing warm weather and there were all of these dogs dressed in costumes.  It was really fun.  We ate at Red Rocks Pizza, which my brother recommended, but we found to be not that great.  However, because we were still hungry after the pizza we ran across this burger joint Burger Fi.  There fries are the best and the milkshakes are so so so thick and delicious and the burger of course was juicy and tasty.

I’m nearly done my dissertation proposal.  So, should get back to working on that…  But before I stop, I found a paper “Challenges in Resource and Cost Allocation” by Toby Walsh published in AAAI just this year.  He claims that food bank distribution of food to people is a challenge problem.  This is awesome!!  I would so very much love to be working on trying to come up with solutions to this problem.  I have experience working in food banks and know the trouble with fair distribution and expiring foods.  Well, ok, back to writing.